Portraits from Ukraine: Lesya Orobets’s Campaign

One morning last month, a young woman with flowing red hair and a chocolate-colored wool coat strode across the plaza in front of Kiev’s hilltop parliament, known as the Rada. Lesya Orobets, thirty-one years old and among Ukraine’s youngest members of parliament, was on her way to a voting session.

For months, Ukrainians had gathered down the hill in the Maidan—Kiev’s revolutionary square—to protest the corrupt government of President Viktor Yanukovych, and the government had viciously struck back, killing a hundred protesters. During the turmoil, Orobets had emerged as a forceful and photogenic public speaker, both in the Maidan and in the Rada. In January, after the first protesters were killed, she had worn a bulletproof vest to parliament to call attention to the violence. The image went viral. (Later, she appeared in news coverage wearing a T-shirt that said “Ukraine: Fuck Corruption.”) Orobets, known as a tenacious local politician, became a national figure.

Yanukovych had fled, but the protesters kept coming. Outside the Rada, they stood in small groups, each with its own cause. One consisted of a couple dozen middle-aged men, wearing military uniforms or the combination of black leather beanie and jacket that is fashionable in Ukraine. Several held up black flags decorated with golden anchors, which identified them as naval veterans, and the slogan “Victory is where we are.”

As Orobets made for the Rada’s front steps, an elderly woman in a leopard-print coat and hat stepped in her path, speaking anxiously and waving a sheaf of papers. Orobets patiently listened and examined her paperwork. She was trying to get money from her bank, she said, and her credit had suddenly been cut off. This was unfair, she complained. What good was a revolution if she couldn’t afford to eat? Orobets continued reading silently.

Finally, a loud bell rang from the Rada, and Orobets handed the woman’s papers back and dashed up the steps. Inside, Oleksandr Turchynov, the country’s acting president, looked down from a raised dais, and members of parliament milled around below. Several M.P.s had been allotted three minutes apiece to make speeches, and one at a time they made their way to the speaker’s podium. One of them, a representative of the disgraced Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, stood up to blame the Maidan and pro-European forces in parliament for the loss of Crimea. A cry arose from the rear of the hall as a score of M.P.s began shouting at her: “Murderer, murderer!” Undeterred, she raised her voice and kept speaking. The other politicians in the chamber wore impassive expressions, impossible to read.

The revolution, as Ukrainians call their new political reality, is a messy amalgam of unreconciled forces: idealistic protesters, civic activists, right-wing street fighters, established politicians. The continuing threat from Russia has helped to hold the factions together, but it seems unlikely that the alliance will last. Even as the east grows increasingly restive, the rest of the country still must govern itself. In Kiev, the lingering excitement of the Maidan has seemed like the most powerful unifying factor. For people like Orobets, this provides an opportunity; in an interview during the protests, she told CNN that she was “ready to unite the country.” With the political field thrown open, she had decided to run for mayor of Kiev, in elections scheduled for May 25th. “For a long time we had people on the one side, politicians on the other—and the sides didn’t have contact,” she told me. “Now the situation has changed.”

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Orobets’s office is situated in a century-old building a few blocks from the Rada. The walls are decorated with a colorful National Geographic map of the world and a framed picture of a lioness licking her cub. Near the door is another photograph, of a balding man with a mustache. “My father,” she explained. “He’s who got me into politics. When he died, I began.”

Her father, Yuriy Orobets, held a seat in parliament as a member of Viktor Yushchenko’s party, and was an outspoken enemy of corruption. Lesya started as his aide at the age of twelve, and, she said, he taught her everything she knows about politics. In 2006, he died in a car accident, while carrying the results of a corruption probe he had led. “It was supposedly of a heart attack,” she said. “But he was going to meet the president in three hours, and he always said to me that people like him don’t die naturally.” Did she think he was murdered? “I don’t honestly know,” she said. “But it is my dream to one day get into Ukraine’s security archives and find out.”

Orobets earned a law degree, and worked at a finance company. In 2007, at the age of twenty-five, she was elected to parliament, as an independent member of the opposition party Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense. For a time, she joined a coalition with the Fatherland Party, run by the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who enriched herself so conspicuously in resource deals with Russia that she earned the nickname Gas Princess. Unlike most other Ukrainian politicians, however, Orobets managed to retain her independent image. In office, she worked vigorously against corruption, targeting bribery in higher education, as well as illegal land grabs by Yanukovych’s officials and their cronies. She talks often of setting a record by sending more than eight hundred appeals to government officials. “I gained the budget at least a hundred million dollars in money saved from halted corruption,” she told me.

In the mayoral race, she said, she was determined not to collaborate with Ukraine’s oligarchs, the half-dozen billionaires who had made fortunes during the unrestrained privatization deals of the nineties. Orobets had not taken their money in parliament, she said, and she would not take any now. Instead, she had assembled some fifteen hundred young volunteers, veterans of the Maidan, to work on her campaign. Old-school Ukrainian politicians usually hired their teams based on nepotism, she said: “Those people usually, one, are incompetent in solving the real problems of Kiev citizens, and, two, are not interested in it. They have a post. They have money—corruption profits included. They are satisfied with their life.” Her volunteers were determined to “change the rules of the game in Ukraine.”

Orobets was nine years old when the Ukrainian people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to withdraw from the Soviet Union. Her generation is—or would like to be—the first to grow up free from the obligations that came with being a Soviet client state. She and her friends speak proudly of their Slavic culture, but they want to travel, to move out of the dingy Soviet-era apartment blocks that dot the city, and to speak freely about the government. Orobets told me that what her generation wants most is to make Kiev “the European capital of Ukraine.”

When I asked Orobets about the standoff with Putin, she said, “No one wants to live under the situation of the Cold War again, when we could be invaded at any time.” She spoke about the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 agreement endorsed by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, in which Ukraine agreed to get rid of its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. By annexing Crimea, Russia had clearly flouted the agreement. “The whole system of global security has to be revised,” she said. “We need military assistance, including from the U.S., and we must also defend ourselves,” Orobets said. I pointed out that Ukraine’s army was no match for Russia’s. “Our army is better than it was a week ago,” Orobets said proudly. “We will fight. We are great freedom lovers.”

Orobets sits on the Rada’s foreign-affairs committee, but her legislative focus has been less on geopolitics than on the small-scale practicalities of rebuilding civil society. She was especially proud of instituting a smoking ban in public places. In her office, she produced a graph that showed mortality rates decreasing in Kiev. “At least fifteen hundred people lived longer than beforehand,” she said. She worried that the tensions with Russia would increase military budgets, at the expense of sectors like education, where investment was badly needed.

I asked Orobets whether the rough-and-tumble politics of the Maidan posed a threat to elected politicians. She shook her head. “We have so many other problems here—the Maidan is the least of them,” she said. “The Maidan represents a way of thinking more than it does a place. It’s about people demanding respect of their leaders.”

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In November, 2012, Orobets went on Facebook to protest the government’s treatment of her husband, Oleksandr Omelchuk. Before the elections early that autumn, as Orobets tells it, Yanukovych’s people had come to Phoenix Capital, where Omelchuk worked as an investment banker, and offered three million dollars if she would join the Party of Regions. She refused, and not long after Omelchuk’s office was raided by security forces on the orders of tax authorities. Recently, I met Omelchuk in a café, where couples danced closely to twenties swing music. A raffish-looking young man with a goatee, Omelchuk told me that several armed agents from an organized-crime unit had burst in to his office, battered his employees to the floor, and then taken computers and files. “They effectively killed my business,” Omelchuk said. “Our clients’ confidentiality had been violated.” He was accused of tax evasion, and, after a months-long legal battle, he was ordered to pay eight million dollars or face fifteen years in jail. He learned of the verdict in a phone call from his lawyer. “The minute he told me, I turned off my cell phone and left Kiev,” he said. He knew that he had little time before they came to arrest him.

The day after the verdict came in, Orobets held a defiant press conference. “To all these tushky”—sellouts—“with ministerial epaulettes, remember that not everyone can be bought and not everyone can be intimidated,” she said. Omelchuk made his way to Chicago, where there is a sizable Ukrainian émigré community. He stayed nine months in the U.S. and applied for political asylum, but before his application was processed the violence erupted in the Maidan. He took his chances by flying into Lviv, in western Ukraine, and took a bus to Kiev. He camped out with protestors on the Maidan for several days, and then, when things were safe, he reunited with Orobets. Since Yanukovych’s ouster, his criminal case had dissolved. “The tax police have said my case is closed,” he said, and smiled. “I am not a criminal anymore.”

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Orobets talks often of fixing the economy—of “improving the investment attractiveness of Ukraine”—and suggests that having more money will help diminish the threat from Russia. “What Putin wants is to stop the Ukrainian election from happening,” she told me. “And the risk is real. We must push ahead with the economic reforms, but to do it we need a new government, which is why Putin wants to stop it. If we can reform the economy, it will be harder for Putin to have ethnic Russians making claims, because there will be nothing for them to complain about.”

For Orobets and her fellow-politicians, the challenge is appealing to a generation for which the Maidan was a defining victory. “Everyone now thinks of themselves as part of the Maidan—I do, too,” Oksana Stavniichuk, a twenty-three-year-old journalism student, told me. “But more than the Maidan generation, we call it the Dignity Revolution. The corrupt government is gone. We have recovered our dignity.” To this way of thinking, everything associated with the previous regime is tainted. “Orobets is a politician, and represents herself as ‘the future,’ “ Stavniichuk told me. “Everyone wants to believe her, but she does also represent the old.” Orobets was linked with the most progressive aspects of Ukrainian politics, she said, but that might not suffice: “This is still controversial, because everyone knows she worked with Yulia Tymoshenko for a long time, and nobody likes Tymoshenko right now.”

One evening in late March, Orobets met with two dozen senior campaign volunteers at a friend’s photo studio in Podil, an ancient neighborhood near the Dnieper River, which bisects Kiev. The floorboards were painted white, and everyone was asked to remove his shoes at the door and put on white cotton booties. The studio’s windows opened onto a square where old trams rattled by. On the hill above, the eighteenth-century St. Andrew’s church was lit up, its gold domes gleaming in the night sky. Orobets stood to greet the volunteers, and pointed out that the mayorship was up for grabs for the first time since 2008. The last mayor, an evangelical Christian businessman nicknamed Cosmos, was regarded as corrupt and mentally unstable; he was forced from office in 2012, and since then Kiev had been run by a city councillor.

In the effort to bridge the old and new, Orobets’s campaign combines a capitalist message with Occupy Wall Street tactics. “In the end, the fight for the unity of Germany was won not by NATO but by Germany’s hardworking persistence, Germany’s economic miracle,” she told her volunteers. “And I think that’s the way that we must choose to go. Because now to spend a year, two years on hard financing to create the police and the army, and then go to war in Crimea and try to get something back—it will mean wasting the lives of thousands of our best. As women, we still feel the consequences of the Second World War—so we don’t want this.”

After the initial polls, some reports suggested that Orobets was trailing in the race, but she dismissed them as “propaganda.” With no budget for television ads, she asked her team to visit the home of every Kiev resident before Election Day. “That’s how we’re going to get our message across,” she said. “We will be waging our own war here in Kiev, and it is no less important than what the soldiers do in Crimea.”

In private, she acknowledged the limits of her strategy. “Campaigning without money is not easy,” she told me. The leading candidate, a former boxing champion named Vitali Klitschko, has more money and deeper associations with the Maidan reformers. He had twenty-five per cent of the vote; Orobets has ten to twelve per cent, and her other rivals less. But she remained hopeful. “We still have thirty days left,” she said. “I have to work as hard as I can.”